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A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

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It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, it’s a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. It’s a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Puccini’s La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And that’s at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at Park Theatre , writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. It’s part comedy, part music appreciation.  It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Puccini’s latest work, which is drawn ...

Romford burning: A Local Boy @ThePleasance


It had only a short run but A Local Boy which concluded yesterday at the Pleasance Islington is a great new piece of writing by Dan Murphy. The dialogue is funny and incisive about the cruel trials and traumas of today's youth, where anything is fair game and everything is online.

It is a world where there is no privacy and sometimes this has unforeseen consequences. This time there has been an incident at the local war memorial in Romford where young people hang out and drink.


A boy has been killed. Burned beyond recognition. A mother worries for her son who is out. A girl is waiting at a bus stop for someone who does not show. And two teenagers find love online. Through a series of flashbacks and cuts, their shocking and sad stories emerge.

Murphy has a real feel for natural dialogue and the cast be bring this tale to life with humour and tenderness. With simple staging the actors and the dialogue do the work to evoke the humour and harshness of life in outer London for young people.

Tim Bowie as the young lad looking for love online and likes a bit of a laugh. Abigail Rose as the pragmatic young girl looking to lose her virginity. Ross McCormack as the seemingly laid back lad who likes to drink in the park where men have sex with men.


A Local Boy is the result of eleven months of reserach and development with writer in residence Dan Murphy. It has been part of theatre company Invertigo's Creative Shed programme, a collaborative approach to developing new work. Keep an eye out for their future productions...

⭐︎⭐︎⭐︎⭐︎


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